Riffs - Volume 3, Issue 1 by riffsjournal

Experimental writing on popular music

Ideas of Noise...

Vol. 3 Issue 1 April 2019

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), Birmingham City University, 5 Cardigan Street, Birmingham, B4 7BD, UK Guest Editor Nicholas Gebhardt

Managing Editors Craig Hamilton Sarah Raine

Editors Emily Bettison Asya Draganova Matt Grimes Dave Kane Ed McKeon Richard Stenson Sebastian Svegaard Iain Taylor

Designers Laura Chen Iain Davies Iain Taylor

Riffs is published twice a year. Copyright information Contributors hold the copyright to their submitted piece. They may distribute their work in the journal format as they see fit. Contributors also have the right to republish content without permission from the journal.

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music (online & print) ISSN 2513-8537 Funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR).

S T N E T N O C

Editorial - Nicholas Gebhardt

Nurturing the Noise - Dominic Deane

Spit Saxophone Spit - Tina Krekels

To the Roadside - Tom Pierard

Visions of Sound: An experimental review on Alograve - Alice Tomlinson

Playing with Words - Mike Fletcher and Nicholas Pillai

“Noise as Ideas”, “Manifest as unreduced”, “‘pure’ thought” - Elvin Brandhi

Collecting the noise/Interpreting the noise: Walking through the city as a soundscape experience - Marek Jeziński

Wild Pop Lore: Material Self-Mythology Through Dismantled Performance in Pursuit of the Impossible - Gustav Thomas

Sound Writing - Sherrie Edgar

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L A I R O T I D E

HOWLING CATS AND BARKING DOGS

Nicholas Gebhardt

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“We were living at the time in a tiny ground floor apartment in which I was trying to write,” the novelist Ralph Ellison recalls in Living with Music, his autobiographical account of Harlem in the early 1950s. “I say ‘trying’ advisedly,” he continues. “To our right, separated by a thin wall, was a small restaurant with a juke box the size of the Roxy. To our left, a nightemployed swing enthusiast who took his lullaby music so loud that every morning promptly at nine [Count] Basie’s brasses starting, blasting my typewriter off its stand. Our living room looked out across a small backyard to a rough store wall to an apartment building which, towering above, caught every passing thoroughfare sound and rifled it straight down to me. There were also howling cats and barking dogs, none capable of music worth living with, so we’ll pass them by” (Ellison, 2002: 4). Ellison’s vivid sketch provides a useful starting point for thinking about our ideas of noise. His evocation of an everyday auditory terrain, with its uneven, fluid and varied sonic contents, opens onto a different sense of musical experience that is subterranean and dispersed, as focused on the uneventful noises in our lives as much as it is about ordinary encounters with music. Sometimes there is just too much going on, too many competing voices, to know what to say or where to begin. And at other times, the silence can be overwhelming.

Open the window, listen for the uptown local, groups of people passing by, conversations in motion, disputes underway. Pause. Rewind. And then there’s the fridge! Humming and heaving and hissing and clacking. It’s surprising, really, that no one has written a piece for multiple fridges, something like John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios. Haze of sound, random references to Mozart, Korea, etc. Popping of ice, squeaking door, pulsing electrical hum. Stop. Enough. Start over. Creaking pipes in winter, used as ancient time-keepers. In the summer, breeze-filled curtains spin outward, caught between the car horns, the screeching brakes of a taxi and the non-stop hammering in the apartment below. What are they DOING in there?! Writing with noise starts with a message, dialogue, some advice, observations about how to get things done, a list of items we can’t forget, a program of sorts, pens, camera, paper, running order, catering booked, participant list, looking for the venue, seating set out for thirty people, some of them on couches already, waiting, a welcome and…off we go. Listen carefully to what she says. Writing with noise is an art, useful for getting along with others, for keeping on the move when you can’t think of where to go, of travelling light and trying things out and on. Low-fi dreaming. Over one minute, repeated eight times over, we find a rhythm of scrawling that fits with what we want to say and how. And how? This is the challenge; always, with this exercise anyway. Stop start. Stop. Start. Hands tired, out of ink, stupid pen, stop. Start. Running out and over with images of sounds, trying to get at what the clear lines coming out of her instrument felt like, what we heard. It’s hard to settle on adjectives; much easier with verbs. So many quickly alight on the page: sounding, tracking, scurrying, sloping, slipping, slouching, and so on. Face to face with another person, your partner in crime for this exercise anyway, brings new connections, search for a common tongue, a quick relay between vowels and groans and laughter. Then we drift apart. All too soon, it’s over.

Edgework. Or working-the-edges. Or edging sounds into focus. These seem like useful definitions of writing with noise. Tracing out the limits of a particular sound world becomes a way of identifying new zones of noise-like activity. Noise-zones. “These worlds are structured by their own distinct edges,” Edward Casey says, “edges after edges, edges upon edges, and edges beside edges. Edges are everywhere, even if we do not have many names for them other than conventional terms (often classical in origin) like glissando, which calls for the merging of discrete edges into one smooth glide whose edge is that of the whole assimilated mass” (Casey, 2017: 160). Getting to the edge of things requires some sliding and shifting of position, nimble foot work, a quick wit, a bit of scrambling across rough ground. Reaching out, tumbling forward, fading away, all those points where things might happen… The articles in this edition of Riffs form a map of these multiple sonic terrains, guiding us across the larger landscape of experimentation and expression. They mark out many levels and layers of possibility for getting from A to B, sometimes directly, and sometimes taking the long way around. They try to make sense of the sounds that reside in our experiences, conditions, things, moods, imaginaries, and gestures. Their methods are quite often divergent and conflicting, hinting at longer reflections, future projects, memory loss and adventures resumed. They mix terms and times, manners and music, figures and frames, jumbling this and that problem, history, practice, theory, and process, to create a fast-moving journey in thinking and writing and testing out the things that words can do. Nicholas Gebhardt is Professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies at Birmingham City University and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). His work focuses on jazz and popular music in American culture and his publications include Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929 (Chicago University Press, 2017).

NURTURING THE NOISE

A compilation of audio tracks from various Yorkshire based noise artists. Curated by Dominic Deane

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I asked participants from the Yorkshire noise music scene to contribute to this compilation tape. These musicians have been subjects of my PhD research on the DIY scenes of Leeds. DIY music making in Leeds has been strongly rooted in the city due to its working-class heritage, and these tracks reflect the inclusive nature of sounds created by those participants. Some of the artists featured have been figureheads of the noise scene, while others have crafted their own experimental sounds into a steady stream of limited physical releases, from CDRs to tapes. Noise takes its influences from rock, punk and psychedelic music. Noise musicians experiment with a variety of sounds, using a selection of physical instruments and/ or homemade DIY circuit bend instruments. Several of the musicians featured in this compilation work with improved sonic textures and tones in particular.

https://soundcloud.com/popmusicjournal/sets/nurturi ng-the-noise-mixtape

Mix Tape Listing 1. Territorial Gobbing - Shaved Back Matted Shoulders 2. Legion of Swine - ön snackar tillbaka 3. Ashtray Navigations - Shark Lipz 4. Moi_6 - Blast01 (SendA) 5. Un sacapuntas - In a Tar 6. Neil Campbell - Mirror Mania Ersatz Climax 7. Pinger by Drooping Finger - A Remixed track by Billy Billy 5P Dominic Deane is a lecturer and musician based in Exeter, Devon UK. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, where he is working on a thesis about DIY and independent live music in Leeds post 2000. In addition to his academic pursuits, he continues to perform in several Leeds-based bands and previously promoted gigs and ran a DIY label in Leeds. His research interests include creative music technologies, local cultural industries, and the sociology of contemporary music.

SPIT SAXOPHONE SPIT Tina Krekels 1 EUSSI 3 LOV

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This is a performative essay focusing predominantly on spit as feminist noise. Spit is part of my practice around the saxophone, spit noises the body and sounds of Saxophone, a character in this performative essay. Spit challenges noise masculinity by loosening, melting and kneading the hard contour of the instrument into entangled, fluid bodies. As part of my sound practice I play the saxophone; I play around its mouthpiece, lick around its bell and use an assemblage of microphones to make audible all these wet, spitty and noisy sounds. These experiences as a performer have given me ideas and research material to develop a writing method that presents Saxophone as a character in performative essays. In these texts I explore spit as an agent of Saxophone, something that is a feminist noise against established ideas of masculine playing techniques on the saxophone. Through this performative essay approach, I write fictitious stories that are grounded in actual experiences and wider socio-political research. Spit becomes an explorative tool that travels through the instrument’s body, changes the hard metal body, ‘noises’ the stereotypical ideas of masculine noise and focuses on a sensuous, but humorous approach to noise making.

This essay will concentrate around free improvisation practices. Here I want to use spit – or fluidity in general – as a deliberate tool to critique ideas of ‘controlled’ or technicallyadvanced free improvisation playing techniques. Spit (liquidity) will be used as an oppositional method to hardness, and will find its full form in the latter part of this essay. Fluidity allows an entangled practice: it gets stuck, it is a nuisance, it tickles, it dribbles, it is sticky and thus creates connections. It enters spaces, softens the materials and allows a different noise to occur when using as part of a performance practice. Moreover, spit becomes hands, it is the material that touches the instruments, microphones and thus turns me and the instrument into an entangled noise. Quite simply, it is a low-labour effort of performing, it doesn’t require the stereotypical full-blown loud saxophone noises. This spitty practice tries to make audible hidden spaces. Since the masculine world is the systemic power in which we participate, background objects, including saxophones but also other instruments or tools used to make music, remain within a male ontology. The same goes for free improvisation practices, although arguably more ‘experimental’ and noisier in their sound, some players still hold an attitude where the instrument is the desired object that can be mastered through exercise and certain sounds or playing techniques. In a simplified way the instrument remains within binary structures of patriarchal control: it is not entangled – as I’ll explore further below – to the human, but rather an instrument is detached from the body and viewed as a separate entity. The saxophone requires a physical, muscular control over its body, playing this instrument therefore proposes a strict exercise of human over nonhuman. Comparing playing to bodybuilding, a very strict routine of mind over body. Bodybuilding requires forms of persistence, repetition, strength, endurance.[1] [1] Richard Dyer. “The White Man’s Muscle”. In: Visual Culture and Gender. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Volume III. Routledge, 2014, pp. 78–104.

Only a hard, visibly bounded body can resist being submerged into the horror of femininity and non-whiteness. The built body is an achieved body, worked at, planned, suffered for. A massive, sculpted physique requires forethought and longterm organisation; refines of graduated exercise, diet and scheduled rest need to be worked out and strictly adhered to; in short, building bodies is the most literal triumph of mind over matter, imagination over flesh.[2] The preparation of the instrument can be an opener to consider instruments and bodies as ‘fluid’, and entangled entities. Feminist improvisation can only be fruitful if we resist established and patriarchal structures. Capitalism needs individuals and groups to adhere to mediated forms of identification and cultural practices to continue working. I want to follow Audre Lorde and her margarine.[3] During the Second World War Lore, a black feminist activist, coloured her white margarine yellow.[4] The margarine was sitting outside to soften, but the white colour was not appealing, because it should remind people of creamy butter. So, Lorde and her sisters kneaded food colouring into the softened margarine.[5] The enjoyment they felt when kneading the soft and fatty substance into yellow is an image to use when thinking about instruments and their hard bodies. [2] Richard Dyer, White, Routledge, 1997, p. 82. [3] Especially her text “The Erotic as Power“, in Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984. Lorde, 1984, pp. 70. [4] In her essay „Uses of the Erotic“, Lorde discusses how the Erotic needs to be reclaimed by women as a form of power, taking the Erotic away from the pronographic view of man. It is especially her example with the margarine I find interesting in relation to my saxophone playing. The touching of different substances/bodies, the feeling when things start melting or moving; all of this is an erotic or desirable experience. [5] Ibid. pp. 70.

Instead we could allow us to think that instruments’ bodies can be loosened or changed with the way we touch them (play them) and engage with them. Preparation of an instrument here could mean that the inside sounds that are often considered undesirable become the ground for noisy exploration. When I amplify my spit going through the saxophone, when I further use a distortion pedal then my spit loosens the expected sounds of the saxophone into a noise assemblage. This experience – where the saxophone sounds different, where those human liquids in a small, bended tube allows us to share enjoyment with each other inside a structured space through touch and kneading. Lorde calls this experience the Erotic; it allows us to resist binary processes of existence and allows us to look critically at our history and practices. The body is quickened as the soil is quickened, by turning it over, by folding it into itself, with the addition of air. When air is folded into pastry, time is folded in too: the time of growth, of the swelling of the soufflé, the breathed-in dish. In one sense, the skin is the antagonist of a kneaded world, for the skin is what holds individual lives separate and aloof; it is integument which guarantees the integrity of shape, and signifies the suspension of decomposition that is all life. But skin, which Serres always represents topologically, also holds the dream of the kneaded body, the dough-body, the cogito pisseur.[6] Kneading becomes a metaphor for exploring the instrument, folding the sonic body of the saxophone inside out. Microphones help by amplifying, through breath and spit, the inside to the outside. The Erotic is tuned to kneading the skins and boundaries of humans and nonhumans into a different arrangement. It is a resistance to systemic control, a feminist improvisation of spit loosening the hard borders of masculinity. Now, let us listen:

[6] Steven Connor. Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought. http://stevenconnor. com/topologies/. (Last accessed 10-06-2018). 2002.

The Story of Spit Slowly I start moving my lips in front of her mouthpiece while pushing more spit into her. Occasionally I breathe a little bit to push the spit further into her body. Vibrating the air between her reed and mouthpiece. Crackly, noisy and distorted sounds leave the loudspeakers and her holes. Salivary glands are working hard to fill Saxophone with enough spit. Feminist improvisation is solidarity with spit, the mechanism of the instrument, the smells, the tastes, the unwanted noises. Saxophone is the centre of attention. Her body offers enactive playing, her assembled body touches my senses. Sounds through touching, exploration of the instrument through listening. Entangling the human and nonhuman bodies into a unit. Neither is idealised or mastered by the other. Our performance happens in the process of touch and a deliberate refusal of reproducing existing idiomatic approaches of free improvisation. Feminist improvisation is doing, an active engagement. A conscious avoidance of rigorous practice routines. Spit is what pleases us. The abject of free improvisation playing. First, I need to assemble a pond of spit into my mouth, pushing it just behind my lips. We need a lot of spit to create noisy and distorted sounds. The tongue moves the spit into the tiny gap between reed and mouthpiece. At the same time, I try to produce more spit and move it to the front of my mouth for the tongue to deliver it to Saxophone. Her mouthpiece slowly fills up with my spit. The microphones inside her body are turned to a very high gain. The inside of Saxophone becomes a space of exploration. Her occupants inside are improvising. Something hidden can be kneaded to the aural,only as they squeeze, only while kneading, only while in action.[7] The kneading is done with the touch of very small microphones. I started using DPA microphones that my institution had in their tech storage, but soon realised that those rather expensive little magnifiers can be easily replaced with £10 radio, lavalier microphones. The fact [7] Gaston Bachelard. Earth And Reveries of Will. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. The Dallas Institute Publications, (1947), p. 89

that those microphones don’t have the same capacity of catching sounds, make them quite unpredictable. Often they distort the signal a lot and that makes them even more interesting for me to explore and expand Saxophone. Little spits, grunts. Blowing through pipe neck. Turning up noise gate and spitting. I often start playing by spitting into the mouthpiece and blowing air through it. While I shape the sounds of the spit with my tongue and throat, I heat up the body of the instrument. Slowly, taking time to warm it up. At certain moments spit drips out of the keys that I am touching, they get wet. Spit drips down the side of the mouthpiece while I use my tongue to stop it from dripping on the floor. Saxophone’s body is getting warmer. The sounds get warmer, rounder, livelier. It feels less mechanical. The keys are warmer, they are nicer to touch. Spit is low in the hierarchy of disgust, it’s negligible, it’s invisible, not even there, formless, when you kiss, lick, bite, the tongue and teeth take the front stage, kiss, lick, bite, though, without saliva, they would be saharas. spit kiss, lick spit, spit bite.[8] We make spit audible. Her body caressing it with her cold, metal skin. Containing my liquid fluids inside her for her own pleasure. Our fused bodies leave sonic spit in the room. Listeners of spit. Microphone and my bodily fluids replace filters, noise gates and digital processing. Sophisticated wet muscle work. Noise helps reduce the belief that machines are mere means to higher musical or conceptual goals.[9]

[8] Christof Migone. "Spit". In: Women Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 11.1 (2008), 17-19, p. 19. [9] Paul Hegarty. Noise Music: A History. Bloomsbury 2007, p. 27

Spit is noise: a nuisance for some. Spit occupies Saxophone’s space, we both love sharing the same fluids. My DNA entering her constructed, laboured body. Spit is decay, the beginning of digestion. Spit is strength, breaking down food for the metabolism. Saxophone takes decay and strength. Resisting the reproduction of practice and creating a music performance through spit. Where are the spit institutions? The spit discourses? The spit paradigms? The spit theories? We are all salivaphiles.[10] The image of two beings in a single body. Eyes, hands, flesh, circulatory system, breath, hairs, spit, mucous, tongue, lips, warmth. metal hard holes keys cold wires screws giant cane felt pad

Fused into a single body, speaking from the same mouth. One fusion of a practico-sensory totality. Touching each other turns the skin into a generalized thumb.[11] Something feeling the other. Without touching we are no bodies, no borders. Through touch, through exchange of materials (spit, breath, metal), Saxophone and I are inside a close space of touch. Our liquids against phallic hegemony in free improvisation. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting though it; and it consumes (...).[12] [10] Migone, 2008, p. 19. [11] Michel Serres. The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Bloomsbury, (1985) 2016, p. 26. [12] Karl Marx. “Fragment on Machines”. In: Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader. Ed. by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Urbanomic, 2014.

Metal skin with orifices, covering the circulatory air tube. Human spit hanging between reed and mouthpiece, stuck in neck. Touch has the virtue of closing and outlining an interior. [13 ] An analysis of fluid moves to a point of outlet. A postorgasmic state, the endpoint of masculine.[14] Desire is about a release of fluids that are the answer to any tension. The man ejaculating puts him back into a balance of steady fluids. The male ego is a ‘reservoir’ for libido, a container for the manly fluids. Saxophone, hard, metal body. You, the objectification of man. Saxophone, a container of male’s libido. Spit stuck at the bottom of bell. No release. Spit needs to leave. More saliva flows down inside. The insertion of the mouthpiece into the mucous membrane of the lips, tongue and palate, followed by a warm, moist flow of spit.[15] Spit is wetness, is woman. Although we are more subject than man to liquefying assaults upon body and mind, especially those of emotion[16], this wetness offers a way to challenge patriarchy, rather than subordination. Wetness opens tools as entangled entities. Saxophone and I are liquid. She oxidates through my spit, her body explored and entered through my spit. There is a permanent process of touching, inside, outside. Different materials touch: brass, spit, felt, skin, reed. These bodies that are constantly touching, are always and already in a condition of pleasure: they need nothing other than themselves. Man’s need for woman as a tool places onus on the tool as a signifier, not of something that is, but something that is to be used. Phallic methodology cannot touch itself and thus it is object and objective. It is neither manifold/many fold nor in reflective relation to itself - its smoothness is mono-directional and perceived as casual.[17] [13] Serres, (1985) 2016, p. 26. [14] Naomi Segal. Consensuality. Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch. Rodopi, 2009, p. 191. [15] Naomi Segal, 2009, p. 191 [16] Anne Carson. “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire”. In: Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Ed. by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 138. [17] Patricia MacCormack. “Mucosal Coseying”. In: Cosey Complex. Ed. by Maria Fusco and Richard Birkett. Koenig Books, 2012, pp. 123–128, p. 125.

Saxophone is a space of pleasure, her wetness with my spit softens the phallologocentric and forceful language of man; instruments can be loosened into companions of fluidity. Fluids like blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears, humours, gas, waves, airs, fire... light. All threaten to deform, propagate, evaporate, consume him, to flow out of him and into another who cannot be easily held on to.[18] These liquids, my spit occupies the performance space, it creates connections to other materials and bodies. Spit travels through these bodies as noise, it entangles us. Skin-to-skin, exciting metal, a deep fold of metal epidermis, ‘invagination.’ Her warm fluids flowing inside, rubbing against cold, hard and dry metal membranes. Reservoir body for her pleasures. Releasing tensions. She can’t come. Containing noises. Aggregate of desires. There is no release for these sonic bodies. An audio-phonic skin holing the touching. Only the spasm of wet mucous membranes and the spurt of organic liquids, the contraction of muscles, shameful excitement, and unmentionable discharge.[19] Microphones discharge inside into outside. She can’t come. Releasing her desires. Taking her tension into their control. She can’t come. Pushing, blowing, spitting. More into Saxophone’s body. As much spit as possible, filling her up. Giving weight. Controlling our unionised skin. Tongue exercises. Somewhere I read about thing-power: an actant’s affect on other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power.[20] Is Saxophone playing a twisted game with me now? Trying to show me who really is in control?

[18] Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Women. Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 210. [19] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Futurability. The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. Verso, 2017, p. 79. [20] Jane, Bennett. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010, p. 21.

Warm metal covered in fleshy skin. Human sputum flowing inside. Controlling her release. Keeping her tensions. Power over her. Human desires. Inside space hidden. Enclosed by hard, manufactured metal. Inside a container for human desire. Keeping her fluids. Rhythmically pushing them through tube. Sophisticated musicking of audio- phonic metal skin. Our boundaries, our skins become provisional and fundamentally insecure. We are one sonic body exchanging fluids, materials with each other. Our extended sonic skin occupies space, what space means, in short, is very largely a function of the perceived powers of the body to occupy and extend itself through its environment.[21] Our intra-active interferences work on us, melt our skins. Spit becomes glue. Minuscule microphones, the size of a fingernail, find cavities to explore the inside, making audible what is oral. One of these microphones gets blu-tacked onto the mouthpiece, close to the wet lips and tongues. If I push the mouthpiece very far in, deep down into my mouth, pushing it against the inside of one cheek then my tongue will touch the microphone. It will be enclosed by a wet wall, what is usually not audible it turns it into a whole range of organic vocal sounds. The liquidity of the saliva, the hissings, and tiny shudders of the breath, the licking of the tongue and teeth, and popping of the lips. The other microphone is moved around a lot, but tends to sit at the bottom part of Saxophone, inside or outside. It makes audible the residues of the spit that has found its way to the bottom. It amplifies the key sounds. Turns Saxophone into a drum. Blu-tacked onto the outside of the bottom keys it will make audible the minimal sounds of two spiky massage balls rubbing over Saxophone’s keys. All these sounds promise the odour, textures, and warmth of another body.

[21] Steven Connor. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 12.

Inside space hidden. Enclosed by hard, manufactured metal. The hidden turning outside. A sonic voice for humans. Long wiry, minuscule transducer turning sounds into signals. Moving inside into speaker. Transducer thing moving inside, slowly moving to the bell. Dragged out. Inside is hidden again. Keys amplified. Kneading of spiky, colourful massage balls over keys. Rubber touching metal. Touching rubber. Massaging old, rusty keys. Melting metal into soft tissue. Inside, spit tickles in kneading, one repeatedly folds the outer skin of the substance inwards, until it is as it were crammed with surface tension, full of its outside.[22]Massaging Saxophone with massage balls. Closed microphones, amplifying the rubbery, dense material massaging over her metal body. Amplified by minuscule microphones. We are touched by our sounds. Kneading saxophone techniques from male to female, mixing, queering them. Her body gives surface for my massage. References Bachelard, Gaston. Earth And Reveries Of Will. An Essay On the Imagination of Matter. The Dallas Institute Publications, (1947) 2002. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2010. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. Futurability. The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. Verso, 2017. Carson, Anne. “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire”. In: Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Ed. by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton University Press, 1990. [22] Connor, 2002.

Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford University Press, 2000. - Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought. http://stevenconnor. com/topologies/. (Last accessed 10-062018). 2002. Dyer, Richard. “The White Man’s Muscle”. In: Visual Culture and Gender. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Volume III. Routledge, 2014, pp. 78–104 - White. Routledge, 1997. Hegarty, Paul. Noise Music: A History. Bloomsbury, 2007. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Women. Cornell University Press, 1985. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 1984. MacCormack, Patricia. “Mucosal Coseying”. In: Cosey Complex. Ed. by Maria Fusco and Richard Birkett. Koenig Books, 2012, pp. 123–128 Marx, Karl. “Fragment on Machines”. In: Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader. Ed. by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Urbanomic, 2014. Migone, Christof. “Spit”. In: Women Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 11.1 (2008), pp. 17–19. Segal, Naomi. Consensuality. Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch. Rodopi, 2009. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Bloomsbury, (1985) 2016.

Tina Krekels I play around with and on the saxophone and write. Recently I escaped Brexit with my German passport. I am interested in expanding the saxophone into a spitty, vocal and breathy instrument as part of my feminist practice, counteracting muscular masculinity in free jazz. When I write I like to entangle politics, pathology and science-fiction scenarios into non-linear meanings. I was recently commissioned by the BBC Scotland for their music festival Tectonics, where I performed with Adam Campbell. I also play with my friends Tristan Clutterbuck and Grant Smith. So far, they have refused to allow me to play some 80s saxophone power ballads with them, all I want to be these days is Candy Dulfer.Â Â @TKrekels

Image by Jamie Kane, Glasgow, 2018

TO THE ROADSIDE Tom Pierard

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In providing contextual framework for this piece, the function of drums in popular western music needed to be explored - particularly as the last 20 years has seen significant change in the way drum parts are created along with how they contribute musically in both a performed and recorded setting. Popular music has been transformed over the years by the advent of the MIDI Production Centre (MPC) —which allows the storing and performance audio samples— in the late 80s, and Digital Audio Workstation software such as Ableton Live or Protools. Essentially, this liberates drum part creation from solely the hands of performers, and into the hands of bedroom producers and other non-drummers who previously lacked the capability. As a result, the function of drumset elements in pop music has become highly divergent to the point that a general model no longer exists (Krebs et al, 2013); for example - where the role of the hihat has been to provide regular subdivision, it has now become a means of providing ‘organic’ characteristics within a highly quantised musical environment, and is often played in manually via an MPC of MIDI controller (as opposed to the kick and snare which are sequenced) to achieve this aesthetic. What was once mostly just regular 8th note patterns is often now a flurry of triplets and 16th note bursts (as can be heard in tracks like Rockstar (Malone et al., 2017), and In My Feelings (Graham, 2019). Bearing this in mind, there are still metric ‘waypoints’ within the bar which, when ignored, do little to fortify the rhythmic foundation of the piece. This work aims to challenge the rigour with which a produced track should adhere to these metric rules, as well as exploring tone and prominence (mix-wise) in a similar musical setting.

An important characteristic which separates Pop music from other genres it’s a lack of superfluous rhythm, with ‘overbearing’ complexity being generally regarded as less accessible in the wider listener populace (Madison et al. 2011). If the adage ‘less is more’ was ever relevant, then it’s with Western popular music, which has from the get-go endeavoured to provide mass appeal through the deliberate avoidance of alienating even the most disengaged listener. Rather than using an entirely contrary approach of an improvised style (such as free-form jazz) for this work I’ve attempted to ‘split the difference’; the improvisation happens at the bar-level rather than a form-level, and is looped. This is largely because I felt that a more improvised drum part would distract from the other song elements, and though some parts are obviously not adhering to normal subdivisions within the bar, I wanted to use repetition to retain some sense of standard form, with another aim being that of retaining the same holistic function of drumming in pop; to support rather than to be musically conversational.

While function of individual percussive elements can be highly diverse, for the purpose of this writing I’ve isolated three to discuss; the backbeat, tending to give emphasis on either beat 3 or beats 2&4, the downbeat, which tends to give emphasis on beats 1 or beat 1 and 3 consecutively, and the subdivider, which usually provides metric reference by way of outlining regular 8th or 16th note denominations. Perhaps the most well-known example of performed pop drumming that simultaneously demonstrates all of these these is the 1982 chart-topper Billie Jean (Jackson,1982). Though drummer Ndugu Chancler plays what is possibly the most standard drumset pattern, the part functions so well and is performed so musically that it became synonymous with pop music, and has—in this author's opinion—been a major progenitor of the majority of pop drumming principles since. Furthermore, these principles have been developed rather than opposed through modern drumset performance by players such as Chris Dave (D’angelo, Angie Stone), Mark Giullina

(David Bowie, Beat Music) and KJ Sawka (Pendulum, Destroid) to incorporate techniques to meet the demands of both MIDI sequenced and sample-based music. While these developments involve changes in both hardware, timbre and beat placement, the aforementioned percussive elements are fundamentally adhered to. This can be heard in tracks such as Move Love (Glasper, 2013), in which Chris Dave incorporates a septuplet hihat subdivision, or Blackstar (Bowie, 2016), where Mark Guiliana essentially improvises around a standard pop feel using jazz vocabulary to imitate a feel otherwise created through the manual â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cutting upâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of pre-recorded drum samples. As to why these parts have become the norm in western pop music, one can assume that providing metric reference and forward momentum while outlining form (which these elements concertedly do) is paramount in the drum part. Part of the challenge in composing this piece was how to compensate for the loss of some of these qualities which occur unintentionally as a result of the irregularities (particularly in the subdivider part). One way this was dealt with was by using a large amount of pad synths to provide harmony which, being generally less sonically aggressive than other conventional pop instrumentation, gave the track a more ambient feel, thus negating the need for more overtly consistent subdivision. Syncopation played an important role, as the percussion parts needed to circumvent the quarter note beats without being overly complicated - an imbalance could risk making the track less appealing from a casual listenerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s point of view. (Witek et al. 2014) Below is how each category is approached in the composition of To The Roadside:

The Subdivider This role is performed by a manually-recorded shaker and a heavily-affected looped tabla sample. The two instruments are respectively hard-panned, and are placed in the mix to be as unobtrusive as possible while still providing, when combined, a consistent rhythmic ‘bed’. The two parts were created first by sequencing, and then ‘nudged’ to provide some rhythmic lilt. The table part is largely ignoring the 4/4 subdivision (especially in the solo section at 2:32), while the shaker part is actually regular albeit delayed by a fraction, which gives the feel of being back on the beat slightly. The tabla part is primarily used to denote rhythmic obscurity in the verse sections followed by a more consistent pulse in the choruses (despite being played on every 2nd and 4th 16th note). The shaker, on the other hand, is more regular throughout the track and is less prominent in the mix. The intention here was to create an omnipresent timbre which can create contrasting passages when muted (such as at 1:30). The Backbeat While the subdivider part is metrically untethered within each bar, the backbeat part is consistently in-time, however differences occur in both beat placement and tone. The placement varies between being either on beats 2 & 4 (1:19) or beat 4 (3:05) in the middle of the chorus section. This effectively breaks up the groove in a fashion which isn’t too jarring for the listener while subtly outlining significant variation through the form. Rather than using a standard snare, clap or ‘click’ sound, I recorded, and then transposed myself slapping a table-top. Reverb was added to create spatial congruence between the backbeat and the synth parts, and the synths were sidechained to the backbeat, producing a more coherent mix between the parts. While following the traditional mode of the backbeat element comprising of higher frequencies than the downbeat, the heavily-filtered tone of the backbeat sample is a departure from a normal snare sound. A byproduct of having a sound

that atypical providing such a fundamental function is that the piece sounds more unique, and despite finding it quite jarring during the creative process, this particular ‘snare’ sound is not only now deeply ingrained in the overarching sonic of the work, but is an integral feature. The Downbeat Earlier renditions of the work actually reflect my intention to forgo a ‘bass drum’ tone or downbeat completely, however I felt that some low frequency was necessary in providing a clearer delineation between sections. Like the backbeat part, this part is sequenced squarely on the beat, however in this case, the kick drum pattern avoids beat 1—being the standard placement in most pop music— and only plays on beats 3 and the final 16th note of beat 4. On listening, I interpret this ambiguous placement of beat one as creating a displacement of sorts, which creates a more linear direction in the chorus rather than having the rhythmic resolution which is produced by having a kick drum consistently on beat 1 of each 1 or 2 bars. Some of the rhythmic functionality which was negated due to exploration in the drum part has been instead borne by other instruments, such as the 16th note guitar ostinato at 2:45 and the ‘high bass’ synth part at 2:25 which clearly indicates beat 1 of each bar. This metric outlining was used in order to provide resolution through the introduction of groove-based elements following the more ambiguously sub-divided first half of the song - as a listener with a short attention span, I tend to try and incorporate a wide range of (what I consider) subtle development devices. This, along with my attempting to adhere to something resembling a strophic form, has resulted in a kind of ‘all in’ final section from 2:50 onwards. Certain allowances had to be made in the other instrumental parts - the main one being the need to increase the attack on all the synth parts. In their initial, generic form, the synths clashed too heavily with the off-kilter rhythms, and so I

found that the more space I could leave for them (at least until the outro) the less disconcerting they sounded resulting in a happy medium of standard harmonic movement and highly anomalous rhythmic patterns. In conclusion, I feel that this style of utilising explicit rhythmic foundation comprised of ambiguous subdivision is well suited to this particular style of music, and though ambiguous, it outlines the heavy reliance on rhythmic consistency which coincides with current trends in Pop drumming. While there is a clear demarcation in the tone and micro-subdivision, one can observe that the departure from standard Pop beat placement can have the effect of sounding more complex potentially resulting in a less satisfying listening experience (Heyduk, 1975). Despite this, the drum parts—being comprised of short, looped phrases— did not increase in complexity over the song’s duration, and were intentionally written to be more listenable by incorporating a level of syncopation which averts salient beats without obfuscating the meter. Tom Pierard is a commercial composer and music technology lecturer currently living in Hawkes Bay, NZ. He is presently completing his PhD in the field of pedagogical applications of DAW use, and has recently produced research papers around new systems of graphic scoring, extended polyrhythm function, and the influence of jazz drumming concepts in western popular music. References Anderson, Alan and Fitzgerald, Jon. A Way to Explore the Concept of Rhythm Hooks in Popular Music: Burns' (1987) Rhythm Hooks Category Applied to Top 40 Hits by the Police [online]. Victorian Journal of Music Education, 2000 - 2001, 2001: 22-30. Available at <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=095 338634951240;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1036-6318. [cited 29 Jan 19].

Bowie, D. (2016). Blackstar. [Streamed] Sony. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/0Fao855T3klV3REFRFHRF3? si=D-SYYrfwQCGpfYerLw2PXA [Accessed 29 Jan. 2019]. Bruford, B. (2018). Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer. University of Michigan Press. Glasper, R. (2013). Move Love. [Streamed] Blue Note Records. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/5TbX5Af7orkoGJkY43ly1B? si=u6rX-ApHQ2q-Xj73Y7je6A [Accessed 29 Jan. 2019]. Graham, A. (2019). In My Feelings. [Streamed] Cash Money Records. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/2G7V7zsVDxg1yRsu7Ew9RJ? si=x5XyRuFuTIiXdgZZH30aTw [Accessed 28 Jan. 2019]. Heyduk, R. G. (1975). Rated preference for musical compositions as it relates to complexity and exposure frequency. Perception & Psychophysics, 17(1), 84-90. Jackson, M. (1982). Billie Jean. [Streamed] Epic Records. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/5ChkMS8OtdzJeqyybCc9R5? si=W5vWx9H_T5WdeUEqRCynAg [Accessed 29 Jan. 2019]. Krebs, F., Böck, S., & Widmer, G. (2013, November). Rhythmic Pattern Modeling for Beat and Downbeat Tracking in Musical Audio. In ISMIR (pp. 227-232). Madison G, Gouyon F, Ulle´n F, Ho¨rnstro¨m K (2011) Modeling the tendency for music to induce movement in humans: First correlations with low-level audio descriptors across music genres. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37: 1578–1594.

Malone, P., Savage, 2., Bell, L., Rosen, C., Bada$$, J. and Awoshiley, O. (2017). Rockstar. [Streamed] Republic Records. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/0e7ipj03S05BNilyu5bRzt? si=ihBY7icNTge0r72xndpeMg [Accessed 28 Jan. 2019]. Pierard, T. (2019). To The Roadside. [Online] Independent. Available at: https://soundcloud.com/tom-pierard94108869/to-the-roadside [Accessed 29 Jan. 2019] Witek, M. A., Clarke, E. F., Wallentin, M., Kringelbach, M. L., & Vuust, P. (2014). Syncopation, body-movement and pleasure in groove music. PloS one, 9(4), e94446. This original composition (hosted on Soundcloud) can be heard here:

https://soundcloud.com/tom-pierard94108869/to-the-roadside

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VISIONS OF SOUND: AN EXPERIENTIAL REVIEW ON ALGORAVE Alice Tomlinson

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In Birmingham’s art and industrial playground there is a revolution happening: highlighted orange, titled ‘hotpink’, cut and paste then told to ‘hush’ with the rhythm of a cursor. Vivid Projects in Digbeth is moving to a steady, building, hopeful, frantically engineered electronic sound, a webbing of line after line of code that swells and breaks in waves of noise, of music.. Algoraves – an offshoot of a type of improvised algorithmic composition known as live coding – are a growing movement among both programmers and musicians, the joining of visuals and composition being an inseparable part of their live experience. Minimal techno starts piling up, reversing in on itself. Complex patterns emerge, fall away, then return stronger. Throughout, two agitated cursors move from line to line, scouring, re-writing whilst their audience, eyes to the screen, start in their tentative dance.

In style of all good revolutions, this one follows a manifesto [1] #4. Open process, open minds- we have nothing to hide. Sound“wood*8?” Sound “glass/2 glass 4” Animationstyle motionBlur Maybe I’m mistaken. This is a de-volution, reiterating that music – which we have learnt to understand as an audible pleasure – is no more than a language. Music is described as much as music is produced, with the instrument of translation being a computer turning layer upon layer of mathematics into lip smacking, scratching electronica. Yet like an unfamiliar language, I can’t help but feel that this is an art with an air of exclusivity. As a process of improvisation it is certainly complex and deliberate.These events are often initiated by a live-coder - in this instance Vivid Project’s curator Antonio Roberts (aka hellocatfood) - and mostly taking place within an environment built for live coding whilst also using custom software each performer has created themselves. #5. Software dictates output, we dictate software Producers of live-coding understand their instruments at the core, and with this in mind there seems to be something incredibly freeing about these performances being processes of improvisation. They are messy, unapologetically so, and are created in the knowledge thatevery script will be erased, reworked and resurrected in their next performance. It is a process of pure experimentation. In theory however, this a movement committed to audience accessibility. It is the visual importance of an algorave – the transparency of live coding – that aims to dispel intangibility in electronic music as an experimental, artistic process.

Open process, open minds- we have nothing to hide. In seeing a line of code with ‘harp’ or ‘crash’ and hearing those very words come to life puts the material in reach, the audience more trusting in this unconventional clubbing experience. This sensory process is not magnified by what can be heard but the visuals on screen, which are not only lines of code but, at present, a swelling, multiplying pink cube folding in on itself and its reproductions. No doubt, I feel ridiculous. Dancing to what feel like the familiar chimes of steel drums which are instead running lines of mathematics, lines which repeatedly heavy then smooth the tinny beats as they are typed behind a laptop. These sounds are coarse and erratic, oscillating between fast breakbeats and pauses to create a musical exploration which is fundamentally technological, yet the output – no more than an equation – having an entirely emotive, reactive outcome in dance. But there is a self-consciousness in my instinctive movements, distracted – or so I think – by my subconscious commitment to the work as an installation. The live coding has made the musical experience something which I am desperate to understand, forgetting that this is not an engineering of software but an engineering of sound, a search for new dimensions of timbre and musical movement. Exposing the process is a step toward a solution, but perhaps a step away from the audible pleasure of experiencing the hasty, unpredictable, uncontrollable curves of live music, instead being transfixed with finding reason within the chaos. I’m listening, I’m moving – but I’m mostly looking, waiting for it all to make sense. Admittedly I have turned this into an experience of overthinking, trying to find reason in something that doesn’t need reason at all. To go beyond the digital, the technological and rational mathematics, you will undoubtedly find something

unapologetically human, and personal in each performance. To attend an algorave is not necessarily to appreciate a precise craft, but to enjoy a process of human curiosity and experimentation. The screen may go blank, the speaker make an unexpectedly deep sound in its throat, but the webbed lines go on as emissions of repetitions, ready for a different approach, a different formula and a continuation of musical output through whatever means those behind the laptop have. 1) Ade Ward and Alex McLean, The Generative Manifesto (August 2000) https://slab.org/the-generative-manifestoaugust-2000/ Image credits: Martin Sz Alice Tomlinson is a recent graduate in English with Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Having spent the past year as Audience Development Assistant for Capsule (hosts of Supersonic Festival and Home of Metal), she now works at The RSC as their Events Officer whilst also being a keen writer and performance producer. Her bodies of work have ranged from ekphrastic poetry to play writing, spoken word to graphic novels.

PLAYING WITH WORDS Mike Fletcher and Nicolas Pillai

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Playing With Words is an experimental interdisciplinary practice-as-research project that combines improvisation by a musician and a writer. The idea for the project originated as a result of the two of us having participated in an experimental writing workshop, during which the participants were invited to listen to an improvised solo saxophone performance by Rachel Musson and subsequently to write as fast as possible for one minute about what we had heard. The conceptual-methodological question of how to go about expressing in one creative medium oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience of a different medium forms the starting point of the present project. However,Â Playing With Words is conceived in order to make the process interactive, which is to say that, as well as the writer responding to the music, the musician responds to the writer. Furthermore, as the piece consists of an improvised live performance, the responses unfold and evolve in respect of what has gone before. Â The video that accompanies this text is the very first performance of the piece, and no preparation was made other than to establish a time, venue and rough duration of ten minutes for the performance. As a result, each of the performers tackled the conceptual-methodological issues pertaining to their role in the performance individually. Below each reflects on their approach to, and experience of, the piece.

Video: Playing With Words - Nic Pillai and Mike Fletcher Mike Fletcher Before we started the performance I made a conscious decision to avoid any kind of prior methodological preparation other than that I would wait for Nic to start, and then base my response on what he wrote. Nevertheless, I did contemplate what some possible methodologies might entail. For example, if Nic had begun by writing full sentences, I could have derived syllable patterns from the words and used the resulting rhythms as thematic material. Or I could have taken a more programmatic approach and played, for example, rising pitches as the pen moved vertically upwards and vice versa. However, I chose to leave these decisions until the moment we began to perform the piece. When I started to conceive of this project, the aspect that seemed to present the greatest creative challenge was how to represent words – and also as it happened, shapes – with music was the lack of an established series of precedents. When I improvise in a purely musical context I use a set of criteria that, although very much personal, is informed by a combination of established musical norms - pitch, rhythm, timbre and so on – and my many years of experience as an improvising musician. As a consequence, when I improvise music, the decisions I make as to how to proceed throughout the performance are made in respect of musical stimuli. However, to interact in an improvised setting with a nonmusician presents a new series of challenges precisely because the criteria I normally use would become unstable because the stimuli are visual as opposed to sonic.

As I noted above, I decided not to pre-conceive of any specific methodology. My reason for making this choice was that I wanted the way I played to be as much a result of the performance itself - which is to say, the words, phrases and symbols that Nic created – as the product of my own theoretical understanding of the project. What I realised in the first few seconds of the performance was that without any type of methodological framework in place I had no way to begin, and so I had to quickly make a decision. As can be seen in the video, Nic began by writing letters, but proceeding slowly, one stroke at a time. I responded to this by choosing to interpret the emerging letters as roman numerals, which in music correspond to intervals. This approach provided me with a starting point, and so my improvised response to the first ‘screen’ followed this pattern. It is worth noting at this point that I was not aware of the type of technology Nic was planning to use, so it was not until the first ‘screen change’ that I realised that our performance might divide naturally into smaller episodes, and that as a consequence there would be scope for me to adopt different methodologies accordingly. In fact, the decision to vary my methodological approach was somewhat forced by the fact that I had previously decided to respond to Nic as opposed to taking the lead.For example, a change of methodology can be seen at 2:04 when I began to improvise based on the rhythmic pattern implied by the five syllables in the phrase ‘so am I writing?’. This gave rise to what I consider to be one of the most interesting parts of the performance. Once I had begun to improvise using five-note phrases, Nic switched from text to drawing dots. My response to this was to interpolate an irregular groove based on the appearance of these dots, while still using the five-note motif as a melodic reference point. This combination of methodologies, and fact that the nature and balance of which could not have been reached outside of the performance context, provides a clear example of the value of the creative potential of this type of practice-asresearch.

In conclusion, I found the project to be a uniquely challenging experiment. Before we undertook the piece I anticipated that it would require the both of us to engage in a significant process of methodological conceptualisation, which indeed proved to be the case. Consequently, in terms serving as a practical demonstration of practice-as-research process, the piece has already proved a success. However, in respect of both my own contribution and the potential for developing a closer interactive performance practice with Nic, I feel that there remain many avenues to be explored.

Nic Pillai [sits at computer with his back to Mike; boots up Onenote] NP: (thought-bubble) This’ll be fine. This’ll be fine. It’s an experiment, a work-in-progress. Maybe I laboured that too much in my intro though? It felt like Chris was getting impatient with me. OK – start writing. [abstract lines begin to form the word PLAYING) NP: (thought-bubble) Mike’s waiting to see what this comes out as. Thought he’d just begin playing straight away. Maybe I should have faced him? Last-minute decision to deny him a sight-line, bad idea. Anyway, this bloody room layout means I’m stuck here in the corner tied to the computer. [Mike starts to play] NP: (thought-bubble) This is working! Needn’t have wasted all that time drawing charts and watching Godard films. I’ll not look at my guide notes after all. What’s Mike doing? I wonder if I can follow that? The audience is quiet. Probably a weird situation for them, especially after a formal seminar. But it works because we were discussing fusion, right? Right? Yeah – all the trappings of a lecture but we’ve subverted it by crafting an improvisatory exploration of chance circumstance. [OneNote crashes. Nervous laughter from the audience.] NP: (thought-bubble) Shit. [Boots up OneNote again. Writes HELP. Audience laughs more confidently.] NP: (thought-bubble) OK, gags work. Gags are good. This fucking software. I should have gone with the digital sketchbook after all. What shall I write next? Let’s introduce some intellectual content –

[OneNote crashes.] NP: (thought-bubble) Son of a bitch!!! OK, it’s up again. Look at that BCU screensaver, very corporate. But this writing function isn’t working now. How about if I make these dots. Dot dot dot. Mike’s mickey-mousing them. Ooh this is a bit Len Lye. But is this just drawing now? How is that different from writing? [OneNote crashes.] NP: (thought-bubble) It’s over. I think it’s over. It’s over. [Audience applause] NP: (thought-bubble) Next time I’ll throw fucking paint at the wall. Some closing thoughts As a coherent performance, it is difficult to see this as a success. But as an experiment, it has provided us with a number of routes to follow. Evidently, institutional environment and technological mediation had a major impact upon each stage of the process and so it would be useful to see how outcomes changed with different variables. Equally, now that we have entered into this musician-writer contract, our subsequent performances will be informed by the accretion of shared experience; an interesting challenge will be to fold audiences into what is at present a somewhat solipsistic experience. Bodily interaction, of the sort suggested by Pillai at the close of his reflection, would dramatically affect performance and the possibilities for escalation and discord.

Dr Mike Fletcher is a saxophonist, composer and postdoctoral researcher at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire/BCU. He locates his practice within the fields of jazz and improvised music, and his main research interests are the creative processes and conceptual implications of composing for improvising jazz musicians. Dr Nicolas Pillai is the author of Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image(2016, I. B. Tauris) and co-editor of New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice(2017, Routledge). He is PI on the AHRC-funded project Jazz on BBC-TV 1960-1969, which includes a practiceas-research element.

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“NOISE AS IDEAS,” “MANIFEST AS UNREDUCED”, “‘PURE’ THOUGHT” Elvin Brandhi

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‘Gareth Bale’, a mix of improvised collaboration, pop parroted field recording disorganised into a culturally embroiled slew. Sound as an irreducible language of expression escapes linguistic reduction of psychic, sentient content to flatpackaged recognisable syntax. Here nothing needs to be said, except to underline the fact that commentary and explanation defy the point of opting for an irreducible language, even if it is not recognisable. This Ear-witness account demonstrates the inextricability of knowledge from its context, refraining from reduction of content to facts accessible only to those predisposed with the tools of navigation. Assimilating and relativising what is not immediately decodable without bothering to adopt new rules of comprehension. Noise as knowledge preserves motion and irreducibility of experience, especially interactive experiences.

This piece is made from recordings I made mostly during my time at Raw Academy, Dakar [1]. Recognising samples as mutable clothe: Subjectively navigated site-specific coordinates of a universally apparent interminable flux. I recorded everyday taking parts of conversations, performances, lectures, animals, construction churning them into one diametric audio body, which then in turn spoke for itself. This piece explores sound as a pre-symbolic body of reference for receptivity itself. Counter ‘cross-cultural’ mono-semiotic observation. I tackle the issue of observability itself, the need to battle through layers of imbedded cognitive prejudice acknowledging the necessity to shift conditioning, to self mutate, in order to see independent of reductive assimilation. This is a personal soundtrack to a site specific recalibration of receptivity. The paradigmatic shifts between loosely edited raw content from conversations, to squeezed Skype voices from friends and family, speak from a multitude of co-existing layers. Experience is meticulously complicated, time is invested in from split sides, our mind harbours many agendas triggers many associations. You feature in many peoples mythology, experience is unavoidably collective. As with me, the wanderer unknowing of what I become in and out of my habitual frame of reference, was surprised to find my immediate interpretation dominated by my association to Gareth Bale and Ryan Giggs. This held my interest as you don’t know who you are unless you know where you are. This montage of personified sound explores the concept homes, improvised belonging and reduced receptivity, the multilayered splicing of reality we face in the digital age where perception as the interpretation of content is constantly interrupted by third party instigators. Cognitive ears flung out of carefully sculpted command pools into an primordial soup into contorted inexplicable symphonics. 1. Raw Academy program http://www.rawmaterialcompany.org/_1631

Work done in collaboration with L’Espace Médina, Dakar. Photo of exhibition on Gueule Tapée canal, 6 may - 22 june part of Dak’art 2018. https://www.monsuperkilometre.com/dakar https://www.facebook.com/espacemedinanownow/

Mix made in Dakar https://soundcloud.com/popmusicjournal/gareth-bale-mix-made-from-dakarrecordings-elvin-brandhi-ear-witness-acount for further offshoots see:https://vimeo.com/0nestmalade

Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist and beat producer instigating projects of improvised social overflow expanding haphazardly with circus intent. The main body of her education has been spontaneously co-ordinated contextual shifts which have challenged the tenacity of the self-assured micro-mythological specialisation. She performs in various collaborations such as ‘Yeah You’, who released on Alter, Slip, Opal, Psychik Dancehall and Good Food. Other groups include ‘Bad@Maths’ who just released on Slip, ‘Napalm Tree/OCDC’, ‘INSIN’, ‘Gailvn Keiln’. In 2017 she was given a PRS Oram Award for Innovative Female Musicians; which funded her ongoing portable studio project, making albums anywhere anytime without anyone, battery-op In the interest of de-formalising music production, increasing the accessibility of spontaneous self expression without having to compromising on the quality. During autumn she was a fellow of Raw academy, Senegal’s third session ‘The five elements: Hip-hop Aesthetics and Politics’ coordinated by the journalist-rappers ‘Journal Rappé’ focusing on the affective power of artistic expression through socio-historical cultural perspectives. She co-founded the collective ‘0n est Malade’ in collaboration with Tabara Korka Nydie, who’s film was selected for Gorré Film festival. In 2018 she was an artist in resident for three months at Haven for Artists, Beirut. She took part in the collective living project ‘Mingling for Chimera’ lead by the performance activist group ‘Young boys Writing club’ which took place in Sicily, Alcamo. She has collaborated with ‘Hizz’, Cairo based cassette label, and began an ongoing residency with Nyege Nyege, Uganda.

COLLECTING THE NOISE/INTERPRETING THE NOISE Walking through the city as a soundscape experience

Marek Jeziński 1 EUSSI 3 LOV

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1. The idea of research - Let’s walk Let me take you for a walk around the city of Toruń: although typical urban environment in Central Europe nowadays, it is filled with the significant past of seven hundred years of history[1]. Through three thirty-minute trips in October 2018, we try to explore the soundscapes and the sound spaces of the modern city. To provide variety of urban aural experiences, we go through different locations and listen out for sounds, noises, music, murmurs, rustles, scratches, rumbling, and reverbs made by people, animals, or machines. Our trip starts from the main Market Square in the Old Town[2], a vivid tourist location, attractive for the residents, pupils, young people or shoppers, and explore the main routes of the Old Town usually walked by the pedestrians. As we bid farewell to the medieval tenement houses, we gradually move towards modern housing districts. It is a good choice for people who want to appreciate the tones of traffic jam, and the human sounds supplemented by and then dominated by noisy orchestrations of cars, vans and trams. I [1] Toruń is the city of 200 000 population, located in the North part of central Poland. It is a significant academic center with Nicolaus Copernicus University of 27 000 students. The Old Town was enlisted on the UNESCO list of monuments and places, and it has well-preserved medieval buildings, such as the Town Hall coming back to 14th century and numerous churches or tenement houses and distinctive spatial organization. [2] The main locations in which the recordings took place are presented in the photographs and short video files below.

propose to enjoy these routes since they represent the most popular pedestrian paths of Toruń: there are main road hubs available within walking distance from the Old Town Market Square, numerous services and commercial places. Passing the main streets, namely Różana to Rapacki Square, Chełmińska to Theatre Square, and Szeroka and Królowej Jadwigi to the New Town Market Square, one can enjoy museums, places of interests such as the monument of Nicolaus Copernicus (depicted in the photo no. 1), tenement houses, city walls, restaurants, pizza houses, bars and pubs, bakeries or cafes, and shops providing variety of goods. Do not forget to listen to the audio file representing our trip. Let’s listen to the city A city is a heterogeneous and dynamic idea, which can be interpreted as systematic routine practices focused on human behavior in a milieu formed by people. Principally, such milieu is always filled with sounds. Most of the tones are of human origin: the sound space of every city surrounds an individual in the form of tones, human speech, or music providing a kind of specific soundtrack for everyday lives. The sounds and noises recorded in the project were segregated and interpreted as certain aural categories influencing the human sense of hearing, e.g., natural sounds or non-natural noises, that is, tones generated either by people and animals or those produced by machines and objects.

Follow Marek's journey by listening to this soundscape of the city on Soundcloud.

In this project I follow theoretical assumptions on sound studies and urban soundscape, or the city noise. R. Murray Schafer (1973; 1977) perceives soundscape as the acoustic environment organizing the sound experience of people and understood as any fragment of sonic surrounding, which relates to both natural or industrial environment and music composition, that is, sounds organized by humans according to certain patterns. Schefer’s concept, published in Tuning of the World (1977) and developed in his subsequent papers (e.g., Schefer 2012), was commented and adapted by other scholars in the following decades, and is mirrored also in contemporary research, see: Atkinson (2007), Galloway (2017) García Ruiz and South (2018), Millie (2016). Multiple research in the field indicate that the sonic domain is considered as a significant point of reference, especially in the cities. The latter are characterized by the high volume of sound, labeled negatively as noise, that accompanies the people’s activities. Noise itself, no matter of its origin, “is a prime source of orientation to our surroundings, both removal of sound and overload of aural input are disorientating and discomforting” (García Ruiz and South 2018 3), and in cultural sphere of everyday life ‘noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore’ (Schafer 1973: 29) as undesired sounds interrupting people with their activities, providing annoyances and anxieties, which is reflected in psychological research in the field (Conroy 2000; McCoy 2006; Sacks 2008). Moreover, it the soundscape concept is recognized also in the context of intensive field recording theory and practice, see for instance Flügge (2011), Gallagher (2015), and Marciniak (2011). Field recordings can be defined as “the production, circulation, and playback of audio recordings of the myriad soundings of the world: the sounds of animals, birds, cities, machines, forests, rivers, glaciers, public spaces, electricity, social institutions, architecture, weather – anything and everything that vibrates. Field recordings are made by sound artists and sound designers, researchers, musicians, and hobbyists” (Gallagher, 2015: 560). Moreover, as Elen Flügge implies: we have to listen to sounds in the public sphere and “A sound space is

bound to the individual as a listener and to the state of their auditory surroundings. We are in a complex sonic exchange with our environments, making, muting, altering and auditing sound. The potential conditions and content of what we might be hearing has been undergoing massive changes in recent times: closing in through dense population as well as opening up through virtual means and the availability of private sound devices” (Flügge 2011). The research methods applied in my project were the ones useful for collecting the acoustic data in the city environment (documentation), categorizing the data (classification), and finally, contextual interpretation of the data (interpretation). Thus, the methods employed in the project were: urban ethnography, content analysis, and critical approach to culture expressed by cultural studies perspective (Barker 2003; Chambers 1986; Farina 2014; Hall 1994; Levack Drever 2002, Storey 1996). They allow for the interpretation of soundscape and the field recording placing it in theoretical context. The main objective of the study is to examine the idea of soundscape as an urban phenomenon: contemporary people practice their lives in an urban milieu, as human culture is an urban one in the first place. For the purpose of the paper, as the researcher, I took the role of a flâneur wandering via three city routes recording occasional sounds. The recording was done combining two techniques of data collecting, namely, firstly, “go ahead” technique which implies that the persons recording sound go according to the specific route they intended to explore. Secondly, “follow the sound” mode was used, in which the individuals recording sound try to elastically model their walk to collect interesting tones, so they try to some extent to react with environment. In this phase of the project, I treated myself only as a carrier of the recording equipment: during the field recording I walked with headphones on and listened to music in order not to hear the sounds or noises coming from the streets. This procedure was set to limit the interpretative suggestions (signals or sounds) that might be caused by soundscape itself and thus, could bias the second phase of the activity: the reception and interpretation of the recorded data. The walking routes were also documented with a camera, taking photographs and short video clips, to illustrate the paper. All the photographs and videos were taken during the field recording: I held the digital recorder in one hand and operated the camera with the other. All the deficiencies and imperfections of the videos or photos stem from that fact, as the study prioritized the recording of sound.

The activities described above produced a map of Torun’s soundscape. The three tracks recorded during the field research (recorded independently and categorized separately) are mixed into one mono piece of the city ‘music’ hosted on the Riffs Soundcloud account. 2. The sound of the city People and the city In the recordings done in this project, the sound space is portrayed as dependent on several social determinants with significant consequences for human beings. The places through which the routes led were full either of people or of vehicles driven by people and carrying them. A human is the city subject and object at the same time, which means that people create, define, manage and reproduce the city space on several levels, that can be defined as follows: ⇨ functional sphere: the city servers as a space for people (with shops, houses, squares, services, entertainment, education, transport of people and goods for people); ⇨ behavioural sphere: the city is the area where people constantly stay and they used to behave there in a certain way; ⇨ structural sphere: the city is a place of life, work, education and entertainment for people and these purposes are operated by institutions in which a specific structure of roles, positions and statuses always emerge; ⇨ symbolic sphere: the city is a network of symbols defined by people, read and used by humans for their own purposes; ⇨ material sphere: the city always has a certain physical character, determined by urban architecture (buildings, streets), spaces free of buildings (squares, parks), vehicles, and also people themselves, as the city is a kind of a physical being, usually embedded in a form of specific space, and as a result, the spatial character of cities is expressed through this materiality.

The main sources of sounds registered in the project were: â&#x2021;¨ people: who practice conversations, speeches, shouts, crying, singing, sighing, or physiological sounds; â&#x2021;¨ animals: barking of dogs, croaking of crows, crows walking on the leaves, cooing pigeons; â&#x2021;¨ machines: such as bells, prams, carriages and trolleys, engine vehicles (car and trams), and signals at the traffic lights. The recordings The recording process took place in the October of 2018 (12.10; 14.10; and 16.10) during three over thirty minutes sound walks in three directions of the city: the North, the East, and the West, and the recordings were mixed into one sound 31 minutes long file, which is also illustrated by visual content reflecting in the first place the physical space of the city in which the sounds were recorded. It is worth to comment on two questions here: firstly, why these routes were chosen: the East / the North / the West of the Old Town Square? and secondly, why was it the thirty-minute walks? The basic idea that contributed to the design of the routes and planning the whole project was the need to present the diverse character of sounds in urban environment. Walks had to run along various routes and last long enough to leave the Old Town zone, which is characterized almost exclusively by the sounds made by people, and led to the parts of the city in which people's voices are supplemented by the machine sounds, as in these zones both types of noises (natural and mechanical) occur with equal intensity. Thus, the assumption was to achieve the heterogeneous aspects of the audiosphere, and to represent the heterogeneity of the sound space. On the recording days the weather was warm and rainless, only during the recordings of the East route the day was windy, which is heard in the second half of the recording, as the wind hiss almost constantly attacks the microphone. The sounds in this sequence of the route were recorded at Warszawska Street (photos 11, 12), which leads directly to the Vistula river, hence, one can almost always experience the natural exposure to the wind blowing from the river with different intensity. Additionally, the space in which I moved during the research was an open one, as the routes did not lead through places or halls covered with roofs physically limiting the space.

The walks The detailed routes on which the recordings were captured were the following:

Follow these routes on the map available through this QR code

(a) The North: Rynek Starego Miasta (The Old Town Market Square), Chełmińska, Teatralny square, Aleja Solidarności, Szosa Chełmińska (photos: 1–6; videos: 1, 2)

The North: Video 1 and Video 2

(b) The East: Rynek Starego Miasta, Szeroka, Królowej Jadwigi, Rynek Nowomiejski, Świętej Katarzyny, Warszawska (photos: 7–12; videos: 3, 4[1] )

The East: Video 3 and Video 4

(c) The West: Rynek Starego Miasta, Różana, Łuk Cezara, Rapacki square, town square (at Mickiewicza street and 500-lecia Torunia Alley), Tujakowskiego, Słowackiego, Moniuszki, Kraszewskiego, Matejki (photos: 13–18; videos: 5, 6, 7[1] ).

The West: Video 5, Video 6 and Video 7

The routes (a) and (c) either crossed important communication tracks of the city (streets of Kraszewski, Jan Paweł II Alley, Wały gen. Sikorskiego, St. Catherine square) or led along such tracks (e.g., Szosa Chełmińska and Warszawska streets), that made me to cross the zebras, and only the (b) route led without the necessity to cross any main street, however, it ran up along busy Warszawska street, in which public transport vehicles and cars regularly operate. This fact caused the necessity to stop and wait for the change of the traffic lights or to pass closely next to the traffic signalization. Hence, the numerous examples of the moving or braking cars or trams, and acoustic signals at the crossings (used mainly to help the visually impaired persons) are represented in the files. It turned out in the recordings, that initially the soundscape recorded on all three routes included sounds made by people, and later they passed into the noises generated mainly by the machines (public transport, trams, cars and vans). These tones in general were predictable and typical for the urban environment. There were, however, disruptions in this predictability, namely: traffic lights signalization (repetitive sound of high frequency used for the zebras can be alarming, especially for the people not used to such type of signaling, as this kind of electronic device is not present at all passes in the city) on all routes and the sounds of medical service ambulances passing nearby (this took place on the routes (a) and (c) – in both cases they are present in the final parts of the recordings, but not in the immediate proximity of me recording the sounds). These were the only disturbances in the generally predictable and acoustically ‘safe’ urban sound space. Moreover, a variety of the acoustic data was obtained in the recordings. One can learn from the files that there are places ‘full’ of sounds on the one hand, and on the other, there are spaces in which the sound is indistinct, ‘blurred’, distant, appearing as a slight noise in the background. Frequently in these cases, the researchers themselves could become the source of such sounds as steps on the pavement, limbs rubbing with clothes, or loud breathing, coughing, sneezing, etc. The researcher's body, in general and in my recordings in particular, was intended to be eliminated as a source of sound, but it was not fully achieved, as the case of the footsteps sounds on rustling leaves at Warszawska treet indicates (as heard in the second part of the East route recordings). However, these sounds were natural elements of the city's soundscape.

The same applies to clothes as the sounds of the outfit are typical for urban space filled with people, and consequently, their presence in recordings should be treated as natural and evident. Thus, some sounds (in fact, only a few are present in the recordings) were generated by me myself and resulted from the fact that I was a part of the studied and recorded environment. Consequently, I took the role of a flâneur recording the sounds of a specific city, walking on the specifically planned urban routes. I walked slowly, sometimes accelerating the pace or occasionally slowed it down, and from time to time I turned slightly off the road to record the urban sound generated in a particular space. That was the routine that happened during all the recording days. In the case of the East route, I got out of the main street (Królowej Jadwigi) to the New Town Market Square, where the organic products market was temporarily held, hence the recorded conversations between traders and customers partly concern this sort of goods (photo 9). Similarly, in the North route I got off of Szosa Chełmińska street to walk through the city marketplace, and thus, some conversations registered in this place are related to products put up for sale (clothes, toys, food, fruits and vegetables), their quality and prices, etc. The West walk was relatively different one comparing to the aforementioned routes, as I turned towards the bus stop at Rapacki Square to register buses passing and stopping at the stop (this is an important transport hub of the city) (video 7; photo 14), and it also took place on the other side of the pedestrian crossing next to which a tram line leads. Also there, I turned to the bus stop, registering public transport vehicles and cars starting from under the lights at the pedestrian crossing. This particular place (Rapacki Square) is contrasted with the next part of the recording at the town square at Adam Mickiewicz street and 700-lecia Torunia Alley, where two types of sounds of were recorded, firstly, the one generated by people passing me by (mainly students talking about their current problems at the university) and secondly, the sounds of birds of the hooded crow species (hoodie), which is an omnivorous bird typical of the urban environment in the European lowlands (photo 15). It is also the case of Toruń, as the crow occurs in a variety of sites (parks, squares, housing estates), with the Old Market at the forefront (also the pigeons frequently appear there: this is the most common bird in the center of the city; however, they are not present in the recordings).

From my point of view as the researcher, the most interesting event as regards the recorded sound took place at the square mentioned above: I recorded the sounds of crows as they were walking on the leaves lying on the ground under the trees. So these were not so much the natural sounds of crows generated by their physiological apparatus (referred to as "croaking", but in fact, this noise is characteristic for the bird in flight), but the sounds of birds walking on the ground: leaves were rustling crushed by the claws of crows, making characteristic noises (also heard in recordings from the second day, that is, the East route). However, if one listens to the sound file without being introduced to this context, one can have the impression that human noises were recorded: not necessarily an animal but a child or an adult could walk on the leaves in the park. In this research I was to cope with a specific interpretative framework: converting the visual experience (a real bird under a tree) and rationalizing it within the context of the acoustic signal that was not expected (a bird walking on the ground). People mainly use to assign the sound of walking in the park, especially on the leaves, to humans and dogs walked by people but not to birds. However, these sounds were issued by some crows gathered in this place: there were no dogs or other people walking under the trees in the square. Â In general, interesting was the lack of intensive acoustic impact of animal sounds in the recordings. Animals are a natural element of the sound space: for many species the urban area is the habitus where they live or hunt. The acoustic dimension of a city is constituted by the sounds produced not only by human beings, but also by animals as they are intensively involved in the soundscape of every city. Therefore, I could have expected a relatively large representation of animals in the recordings, as there are several examples of the city animals living at day, such as wild creatures (several species of birds) or the ones controlled by humans (dogs, cats, caged birds). The recordings were made only during the daytime (in the period of high activity of people), which excluded the urban animals active at night (as small rodents, e.g., rats or mice). Surprisingly, only the birds, that is, crows (the West route) and dogs (the East walk) were recorded, however, they were not numerous, even though the routes I went on led constantly near the human headquarters, which for animals means the permanent and easy availability of food and shelter.

3. Did you listen? All routes ran along the city's important transport tracks or directly crossed them: from the center to the peripheral districts of Toruń (Rubinkowo and Przedmieście Jakubskie districts in the East, Wrzosy and Chełmińskie Przedmieście districts to the North, and Przedmieście Bydgoskie and Bielany districts to the West, and going further in the direction of Bydgoszcz city), in which a large number of the residents dwell. Hence, it was not a surprise that all the recordings vastly reflected the communicative domain of life in Toruń: the sounds of industrial, individual and public transport cover large part of the tones recorded in the project. In the analysed files, the vehicles are constantly making loud noises of diversified intensity: the drivers stop, move, turn the machines, and all the movements are accompanied by gradual or abrupt changes in the engine’s operation, the squeaking sounds of brakes, warning bells and high-pitched clatter of the wheels on the tram tracks, etc. These sounds cover the high and low frequency spectra, but the ear of an individual living in the city is generally accustomed to them so much that they do not constitute a sphere of significant discomfort while people move around the urban space. As an independent underground musician, I always deal with sounds, namely, with instruments and electronic devices on the one hand, and on the other with sounds and noises coming from the environment that I used to record to employ them as the illustrative background for music. In my compositions for Tacuara Nod band, L2&T duo, or s.n.igurath solo project, I used the sound tapes intensively. In these experimental dark noise industrial electronic music the sonic illustrations were significant part of many compositions. Accordingly, I included children’s voices, people’s conversations, barking dogs, blowing in the wind, vacuum cleaner noises, TV/radio news, dialogs from the films, doors scratching, forks and spoons sounds, or the city street noises, etc. in the structure of music pieces. In the extreme cases, I built the whole compositions around such pre-recorded tones, as it was in the case of twenty-seven minute Tacuara Nod’s track “The Journey” (“Podróż”): music played by the musicians run along the tape of the Warsaw underground (the Metro) journey recordings, and the subsequent train-stops heard as the announcements on a train forced us to change the mood of improvised music.

While recording the street sounds for the bands I played in, I taped the tones not to listen to them as a means in themselves (as – to say – certain compositions), but they were collected with the primary purpose to be used as the background illustrations that enriched music. The composition as such was the final goal that dominated the whole creative process. Consequently, instrumentations, arrangements, sound proceedings, and of course, the soundscape backgrounds – all served the main idea of music composition. In the present project the sound space recordings were collected to be listened to as the sounds of the city in the first place, and were not supposed to be used in any different project as a sort of background illustrating tones or a sort of specific music. Thus, the recordings of the city walking are the soundscape compositions themselves, that is, they are interpreted as such. I stress this, because during the recordings I started to listen to the city sound space in a different manner than during the recordings I done for the bands. While working as a musician and composer for experimental dark electronic group Tacuara Nod or electronic s.n.igurath project, I was concentrated on the illustrative aspect of a particular project, namely, in my mind I had the plan for the whole composition in which music and the background soundscape were intended as a joint entity. Taking the field recordings for the Riffs journal paper, I concentrated on the sound domain in the first place. In a sense, the city started to “talk” to me primarily by the audio channel. Hence, I started to pay the attention for the elements and details related to the recording process itself and to decode all the physical stimuli by the sense of hearing: a visual sign or symbol had to be interpreted as a result of sound signals that surrounded me. People, cars, trams, and machines were heard in the first place and seen only then. These sphere became of primary significance, and the visual aspects of mine city walking were entirely subjugated to aural domain. Consequently, in the paper I presented the “field recording” strategy to catch the personal sound space, rather than “a musician recording in the field” approach that I used to employ in the previous works.

Professor Marek Jeziński is the head of Journalism and Social Communication Dept. of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland). He is an author of almost 150 academic papers on popular music, popular culture, contemporary anthropology, political science, political language, sociology, contemporary theatre and performance. He published the books: The Quest for Political Myth and Symbol in the Political Language of Akcja Wyborcza “Solidarność” and Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (2003); Marketing polityczny a procesy akulturacyjne. Przypadek III RP (2004), Język przemówień politycznych Wojciecha Jaruzelskiego w okresie stanu wojennego (2009), Muzyka popularna jako wehikuł ideologiczny (2011), and Muzyka popularna i jej odbiorcy w poszukiwaniu autorytetu (2017). His main hobby is music: he plays in the experimental/industrial/ improvised music band Tacuara Nod, and in dark-elektro-cyber punk project Der Birken.

References Atkinson R. (2007) 'Ecology of Sound: The Sonic Order of Urban Space'. Urban Studies 44, pp. 1905–1917. Barker Ch. (2003) Cultural Studies. Theory and Practice. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publishing. Chambers I. (1986) Popular Culture. The Metropolitan Experience. London, New York: Routledge. Conroy J. (2000) Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture. An Examination of the Practice of Torture in Three Democracies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Farina A. (2014) Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods, and Applications. Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer Dordrecht.

Flügge E. (2011) 'The Consideration of Personal Sound Space. Toward a Practical Perspective on Individualized Auditory Experience'. Journal of Sonic Studies, 1 – Inaugural Issue. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/223095/223096. Fong J. (2016) 'Making operative concepts from Murray Schafer’s soundscapes typology: A qualitative and comparative analysis of noise pollution in Bangkok, Thailand and Los Angeles, California'. Urban Studies, Vol. 53(1), pp. 173–192. Gallagher M. (2015) 'Field recording and the sounding of spaces'. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 33, pp. 560–576. Galloway K. (2017) 'Curating the aural cultures of the battery: Soundwalking, auditory tourism and interactive locative media sound art'. Tourist Studies, pp. 1–25. García Ruiz A. and South N. (2018) 'Surrounded by sound: Noise, rights and environments'. Crime Media Culture, pp. 1–17. Hall S. (1994) 'Encoding, decoding'. In: Simon During, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London, New York: Routledge, 90-103. Levack Drever J. (2002) 'Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music'. Organised Sound, 7, pp. 21-27. Marciniak K. B. (2011) 'Muzyka miasta'. Glissando, 18, pp. 10–13. McCoy A. (2006) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Metropolitan Books. Millie A. (2016) 'Urban interventionism as a challenge to aesthetic order: Towards an aesthetic criminology'. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 13(1), 3–20. Sacks O. W. (2008) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. London: Picador.

Schafer R. M. (1973) The Music of the Environment. Vienna: Universal Edition. Schafer R.M. (1977) The Tuning of the World. New York: A. A. Knopf. Schafer R.M. (2012) 'The Soundscape'. in J. Sterne (Ed.), Sound Studies Reader, London: Routledge. Storey J. (1996) Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture. Theories and methods. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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WILD POP LORE: MATERIAL SELFMYTHOLOGY THROUGH DISMANTLED PERFORMANCE IN PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE Gustav Thomas

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Wild Pop was initially conceived as a term that avoids using the word ‘improvisation’ to denote musical performance that is neither composed nor rehearsed (made up on the spot) while acknowledging the centrality of pop (a pop sensibility, pop’s aesthetics) to the majority of music as it is most widely consumed. Wild Pop’s primary distinction from other improvised forms is its commitment to make the final version as if a final version in the moment of its inception; to make definitive performative statements without preconception, planning or rehearsal..

conditions of the hackneyed performative surface: Too hard the rigidity of stark borders unseen by actual eyes and thus made more visible in their hidden im/materiality. My dislodged head looms poised but put back wrong so that the senses upset and entangle so far unproductively - or is that an encumbered aural myopia? Yet the sudden detachment allows me to clearly the interfering fronds that barb flight, impeding evacuation.

The experience of music for most people is one that is defined by order and formality; a pursuit that filters out the messier, truer elements of human interaction, projecting an idealized intersubjectivity in a way that cannot fail to also project certain (generally dominant) ideological fabrications. Music as most people – including performers - know it is something that regulates and normalizes how people think of themselves, other people, and the world as a w/hole. In an essay from 1968 Amiri Baraka coined a term which has become very important to me with regard to how I see myself as both artist and academic, and which I first encountered in an article by Nathaniel Mackey: ‘Find the self, then kill it.’ The whole passage reads like this: The emphasis on self-expression in [Baraka’s] work is also an emphasis on self-transformation, an othering or, as [Kamau] Brathwaite has it, an X-ing of the self, the self not as noun but verb. Of the post-bop innovations of such musicians as Albert Ayler and Sun Ra, he writes: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” 1

Latterly, in an essay published in 2017’s Black & Blur, Fred Moten suggests: The question, whose answer inhabits the not-in-between… concerns the irruptive placement… of the outside… (to what endures of the object’s disruptive anticipation of itself, to the commodity that screams its fetish character and the whole of its secret against the [deafness of the] proper).

… find the self then kill it combined with an irruptive placement of the outside as a strategy to breach the deafness of the proper have become key imperatives for one aspect of Wild Pop in its practical application, those that deal in the unfastening of formal binds in received and imposed protocols for music’s performance, driven by a desire to dismantle some of the cultural and institutional regulation of individual character that music has been b(r)ought to bear. While Moten’s enigmatic juxtaposing of seemingly familiar terms and tropes can be understood to advocate the kind of dismantling of formal protocol Wild Pop advocates, Baraka’s injunction remains both impenetrable and loaded. Baraka’s allusion to Albert Ayler and Sun Ra isn’t casual; what distinguished them from their fellow adventurers in 1960s Jazz (extending the expressive parameters of the sociovernacular immediacy of a Jazz revolutionized by new freedoms illuminated by Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman) was their incorporation and embrace of infectiously spontaneous accessibility. Sun Ra took the pop song and exploded it across, and beyond, wider frames in a way that made it seem inevitable and irresistible at the same while simultaneously using such irresistibility to fire a fantastical, interplanetary self-mythology; Albert Ayler injected and inflected often well-known popular tunes with the vitality of anguish and keening desperation particular to the African-Diasporic experience, before dismantling and reassembling them, such that their emotional tenor was stripped to the raw, allowing melodies often hackneyed by over-familiarity to truly sing out.

72 conditions for the release of militant seed: To unfasten the chords. To burn the trains. To bomb the suburbs. To dismantle the subject. To reverse the tune into the assailant without causing actual bodily harm. [Or yes, depending on the context]. To charm fumes from steel. To sting each leg of constriction with the grooves of escape. To overcome the master, and to deadvocate the overlord.

It’s surprising to consider the extent to which critical and historical writing discusses the recorded work of any improvising performer without considering its status as stand-alone commodity (vinyl albums) severed from its point of origin. And yet for the majority of people who are, or have ever been, affected by the music of artists that made a point of prioritizing improvisation, it’s through listening to albums they’ll have mostly experienced them. What a recording can do, with its performer absent, is establish a self-proliferating mythology around the artist, in so far as the recording becomes a reductive idealisation of expression wholly detached from its creator; while such mythologies extend and elaborate upon the being of a living artist, in the case of the deceased such self-proliferation can obviously be limitless, with the artist themselves no longer able to shape it. Of course, recordings themselves bear witness to mortality, and every recording artist must intuitively understand that their recordings are not only conceived/received as emissions of spatial absence but also a temporal one when they are no longer alive. Because recording and record production are perpetually considered as means to ends rather than ends in themselves, it’s easy to overlook the implications of this. Pop musicians have, of course, traditionally embraced and exploited recording’s capacity to facilitate self-mythology but usually in order to fabricate an idealized version of an invented or dramatically enhanced personality often only tenuously based on ‘who they really are.’

Few recording artist-popstars have used self-mythology as a means to unfasten representational illusion in order to undermine the kind of stereotypical imagery that popstars generally also reinforce (two favourite examples, which I write about elsewhere, are Kate Bush (on The Dreaming) and Nicki Minaj (on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded)). Such stereotypical imagery in turn can be seen to reinforce ruling ideologies that favour a perception of xenophobia, sexism, misogyny and homophobia as fundamentally ‘normal’ (as if because “that’s how everything thinks, really…” – Trump “tells it how it is” and so on). As consumers of recorded music we have tended to accept too readily that an artist’s album is somehow an honest version of the ‘truth,’ which is to say we are seduced into buying into a nexus of myths, which in turn makes us forego a realistic identification with the work’s essence, which embodies, among other things, agency – one’s own capacity to act, to agitate, to interrupt and to intervene. Thus we become accustomed to accepting utterly fantastical and mendacious constructions as ‘normal,’ furnishing an ethical space for the acceptance of atrocity. But normal is one of the weirdest concepts. Who wants to be normal? … and yet who doesn’t fear being deemed abnormal, subject to, as D Ferrett suggests, ‘the threat of exile from civility and3 of being branded with an abject “bastard” status’? Such unspoken rhetorical questions leave little room for deviation or diversion. Which is why Fred Moten’s ‘not-in-between’ is so useful; Moten’s term resonates with Ferrett’s deployment of zero as the condition for potentially an ‘irruptive placement… of the outside’: On each breath, [zero] opens an ever-expanding black hole within itself that is the space and time of unbound desire. Cutting ties with the limelight, zero cultivates movements in the dark that cannot be mapped as ‘progress’ on a linear time line, nor approved or charted by the makers of his-stories. Zero is the beginning of a mobilization that is the dark music practice of another space and time. 4

Crucially Ferrett describes a ‘movement’ that explodes within, dismembering illusory artifice while ‘cutting ties with the limelight’ and mobilizing a ‘dark music practice’ within the performative frame of a pop sensibility where the personality and image of the performer is integral to how the music is projected and received (as opposed to the notion the performing musician seeks to remain invisible through “interpreting” the superior “voice” of the composer-genius). It is this not-in-between zero condition that allows a selffictionalizing mythology to take hold. To respond to the challenge that recording sets the performer by recognizing its status as historical inscription allows you to inhabit that mechanism and take control of it in order to dissemble it – the performer being as much an integral component in the mechanism as anything else. tangled resistance: We were trying to defuse the libidinal gust of dissuasion that had followed us in from the pub. That’s how it looked, but we’d not been near the pub all day. And we were bent up to it. I couldn’t believe it when you jumped because the leap was utterly imperceptible - no one saw it; all they heard was the reconfiguration of a surface that until then had been masquerading as part of the institutional infrastructure: chain of command.

To enter the space of performance possessed with a zero/not-in-between condition and a conviction to yield irresistible commodity that resists mechanisms of constriction and control: to recognize both the fallacy of one’s sense-of-self and the urgency of an historical inscription(recording musical expression) that can’t afford the deferment inherent in planning and rehearsal. In order to succeed, such undertaking requires a level of commitment that will appear reckless to those unaccustomed to interrogating the context of their awareness and sense-ofself. Peter Sloterdijk talks of Seinvergessenheit:

As long as intelligence is sealed up in banality, people are not interested in their place, which seems given; they fix their imaginations on the ghost lights that appear to them in the form of names, identities and business. What recent philosophers have termed forgetfulness of being [Seinvergessenheit] is most evident in an obstinate willful ignorance of the mysterious place of existence. The popular plan to forget both oneself and being is realized through a deliberate nonawareness of the ontological situation. 5

So the self that must be found is the forgotten one: its ‘killing’ facilitates a fictionalizing of one’s existence through the self-mythology of recording and creates the context for the material manifestation of the imagined and the fantastical, as-if-for-real, because ultimately the commodity makes it real. Sloterdijk talks of ‘people’ and ‘they’, their ‘obstinacy’ and ‘willful ignorance’, as if he can speak from a context that isn’t inextricably connected to all of the infinitely interwoven mechanisms that precipitate the conditions for the scenario he describes. There’s no “natural” reason why the reportorial vocabulary of mass consumption should be de facto banal… besides, consumerist culture very often isn’t banal. The pared down topology (what it boils down to) is this: there always has to be something arresting about any commodity that grabs an individual’s attention and coerces them into parting with their waged gains; how that is achieved is, more frequently than not, through an alchemy of illusions, obfuscations and deceptions which by extension accumulatively engender just such a Seinvergessenheit. In the case of music, however (and here we’re mostly talking pop, in the broadest sense, i.e. anything “commercial”, including “underground” “alternatives”) an element of perceived spontaneity is crucial in creating an impression of the moment of hearing-listening’s capture as indispensable and irresistible.

Recording without preparing content or substance, entering the performative space as zero, as not-in-between, means that the historical inscription committed and carried out can only be literally spontaneous. To then seize the opportunity to use performance itself as the vehicle for self-mythology provides the space for some kind of terrible apocalypse: self-sacrifice as spiritual release. And of course itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impossible to really pull off; which in turn provides the best reason to pursue it. irresistible exile: It can only be an exercise in dismantlement from the moment of departure up to the point of origin. Rihanna just left the building and we all ran after her with the ribbons of our tape cassettes glistening the breeze as every local and migrating bird took off to bend the mercurial melisma of our flight.

*********************** Gustav Thomas is one of many identities assumed by the person whose administrative-civilian name is William Edmondes, a private individual who lectures in music at Newcastle University. As a performing and recording artist he works in a number of collaborative contexts as well as solo under the name Gwilly Edmondez; current projects include Fast Loser (with Laura â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Late-Girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Garcia & Tobias Illingworth), Kleevex (with Faye MacCalman), Impossibility Knox (with Odie Ji Ghast) , Leap Wars (with Dallas Boner) and the electronic noise-pop duo YEAH YOU (with Elvin Brandhi).

Gustav grew up in Bridgend, South Wales, in a socioeconomic environment whose atmosphere of subtly anarchocynical disaffection and detachment from mainstream British life was essential to his accidental discovery of totally improvised rock at the age of 13, recording some 90 albums with his band Radioactive Sparrow between 1980 and 2003. Initially studying art at Howard Gardens, Cardiff, Gustav/Gwilly went on to study music and composition formally at Cardiff University (with Anthony Powers), Kings, London (with Robert Keeley) and York (with Bill Brooks), joining the faculty at Newcastle in 2004. At Newcastle Will has taught non-notated and recorded composition, free music, and historical options in Hip Hop, post-WW2 Jazz and hardcore popular subcultures. In 2011 he founded Felt Beak, a loose affiliation of Newcastle-based improvisors and noise musicians posting free album downloads to a tumblr account alongside the Felt Beak vimeo. An associate of The Old Police House, Gateshead, since 2017, Gwilly has also performed and/or recorded with (among many others) Michael Fischer, Pat Thomas, Valerie Pearson, Rhodri Davies, People Like Us (Vicki Bennett), Lauren Kinsella, Marie Thompson, THF Drenching, Hugh Metcalfe, James Joys and Caroline Pugh. Recent releases are available through Slip Imprint, Opal Tapes, Alter and Chocolate Monk (among others). Â Links: https://gwillyedmondez.bandcamp.com https://vimeo.com/feltbeak https://vimeo.com/yeahyou http://felt-beak.tumblr.com/

Notes : 1) Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge University Press; 1993) p. 275 2) Fred Moten, Black & Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) pp. 2-3 3) D Ferrett, Bridget Hayden & Gustav Thomas, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;weaving intuitive illegitimate improvisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 14, No. 1 (2018) p. 90 4) ibid. p. 91 5) Peter Sloterdijk - Spheres. Volume 1: Bubbles. Microspherology (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011) p. 27

SOUND WRITING Sherrie Edgar

1 EUSSI 3 LOV

7358-3152 NSSI

As I look back and reflect, the tracks of life are a specular reflection, wavelengths are rhythms to our heartbeat, on off, on off, stop go. Sounds are memories of places we can’t go, pace of the landscapes never stop and we sometimes just want to go back. Nothing is there, the girl is missing, that something can not be seen, outer space is a soundscape to where we used to be. Let’s board the train, track back, see where I came, friends and parties, pubs and clubs, booze and laughter, free and fun, careless. Rumbling guitars riffs to the steady drum of brighter times, capturing the designs of life. Alcopop tastic Brit rock melodies. We were told it will end, but nothing will end our passion. New dawns were dawning, new technology looming, old traditions fading, no matter what we couldn’t be stopped. Keep going, culture changing, new rules, new ways, your ventures, let's dream, let’s go, cut air fare, bare all emotions, dance, the music soothes, this is why it feels so good. Samba rumba, hand drums intonations of the song, mastering our own rhythm to life. Exotic sun, spinning on the dance floor. Bad is the core of what lies beneath, underground, where I wanna be. Take me down, low mood, deep base takes us deeper to where we wanna be. The baseline is the flat line. Listen to the lowest frequency humans can hear. Sine tones of dirt and darkness, indie funk, grunge, stranger the better, cult to how it used to be, strung up, raging punked up rebel. Anything goes better than a wannabe.

Holyhead, in the head, phone box, 360 drinks all round, crown revolve, same tempo, up tempo, children of the world together, love, peace and harmony, keep going on, on, on, beats pounding as one, electronic pump, four-on-the-floor, bass drum dreams of escapism, piano, glissando is life. Fairground rides and street lights. Places we been, victim to a dream in cream. Let’s not be crazy, it’s just a lazy Sunday, listening to the song on the radio, driving needing piece of mind, those best days can only be seen on a screen, shouting losing my mind. Why we want to be our own front page, can’t you take it easy on yourself? Late night, walking, city lights. Anticipate, tell it how it is, it’s not over, we race, space day, floating, never fade. Songs featured: 1. Everything but the Girl - Missing 1994 2. Manic Street Preachers - A Design for Life 1996 3. Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis Bextor - Groovejet 2000 4. Sneaker Pimps 6 - Underground 1996 5. Robert Miles - Children 1995 6. Catatonia - Road Rage 1998

Link to film: https://vimeo.com/303634057

The train scene is set between spaces. Moving transport (Coventry train station and a taxi rank, with changed landscape behind, once where nightclub Cafe Sloane stood, the first Midlands club to play garage before it became a chart hit), to and from outside positions, the train is what takes you to places, away from where you are. The images cross over to and from the underground subway, where direction is limited so that it only takes you to a certain place, representational of the lyrics in the song, the girl is missing and the visions relate to a place.

Where does a person go when they feel they do not fit into the ‘norm’ and its set culture that we must custom ourselves to? If one is creative and there is no place to do this, entrapment and being lost equates to not belonging. The images combined with the song, ‘Everything but the girl’exists to locations that are my outcomes. To just see the visuals is to take for granted what the eye and mind chooses you to see, my words in this write up communicate literal text giving explanation to the ideas of my mind’s eye. Popular music has and plays a big part in my life, I am sure this is the case for most. The songs featured are the soundtrack to the visuals presented.

The location is set crossing under the subway to the landscape of Coventry’s social high rise housing schemes and shows the boundaries of the area I live in and the city centre to which was a mecca to the golden age, displaying memories from childhood to young adulthood. The ‘Missing’, sang and written by Tracey Thorn with band member Ben Watt, resonates with my younger days. An indie sound, off note love song, I always had this missing feeling. The song is perfect to touch that memory of what was then and doesn’t apply now. And past your door, but you don't live there anymore. Its years since you've been there Now you've disappeared somewhere, like outer space. You've found some better place And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain. Could you be dead? You always were two steps ahead, of everyone. The above lyrics are per se to missing a person, for me it’s the part of, I was everything but the girl. The liveliness and incongruous curiosity, is reflected in such a mood and a situation it hits a cord. The melancholic dark deep uniqueness in music is what is missing today. There was something organic to what was produce then compared to now, "sophistipop" is no longer, the jazzy, rock, house, electronic music imprints the days where we used to walk the town, pub to club, be part of a physical community and walk home in pitch darkness gazing into homes that may one day be part of our lives. Careless adventures at that time reinforces the embracing of life, even if songs were about disturbing situations, it was expressed for us to relate to.

The bull and looking through the pub window represents the night on the town. The backing track, ‘A design for Life’ by Manic Street Preachers signifies that not only did we consume capitalism but we drank it too. Pop Culture was embedded in our lives and as in our youth we lived life to the full. From uncharted territories, we lived in a test bed of all possibilities. Many changes were made in this decade, technology, war, politics, science and travel. More of us could finally be able to embrace life and have better access. 1990’s was the aftermath of the 1980’s economic boom, socialism and liberalism was possible. From John Major’s grey politics, to Tony Blaire’s ‘Britain deserves better’new Labour, ‘Things could only get better’ and we believed them.The music was representative of us the most, we had music that transcended alternative media and new media, we could tune in and dance the night away to all sorts of genres that represented all emotions and life experiences. All music was ‘pop’ whether it was grunge, rock, disco, reggae, R&B, rap, electronic. Multiculturalism emerged raving, from unauthorised M25 parties, warehouses, to superclubs, we led subculture that young people today enjoy at organised festivals. Unfortunately, this has resulted in social control, as the lyrics say ‘What price now for a shallow piece of dignity’, the song explores the contrast of class identity and solidarity. The window and turning disco light in my visual work shows the old media we had let go of, the joys of alcopop, pinpointed to Birmingham with the Bullrings feet, where so many still enjoy a diverse nightlife, however the ripples reflect our distance of this time and determination we so powerfully had.

Birmingham airport and its city skyline is a poignant reminder of how we move, hit the runway and let go. Searching for better, sun, sea and sand, away from the dismal darkness of polluted urban life. This is where we hop on a plane, whether it was a club 18-30 holiday or Ibiza. It was the birth of low-cost flights, advertised via local papers, travel agents shop windows, magazines, teletext or the dawn of travel websites. We could board a plane, experience the latest club sounds free of political correctness. Marketing campaigns promoted party culture with vivid bright posters displaying all shades of people in swimwear enjoying music. We all wanted a piece of unity and to dance all day and night. It was when the invention of new pleasures were possible and we felt nothing was going to stop us. The UK played such an important role with homegrown DJ’s creating sounds that would rock establishment in our cities, bringing back memorable moments that we lived. Dance became pop. My visuals represent this, the local airport that fly’s us away to other possibilities is captured with the song by Groovejet featuring Sophie Ellis Bextor, she sings, ‘While we are moving. The music is soothing. Troubles we thought had begun. And if this ain't love (why does it feel now?). Why does it feel so good?’

The sultry groove had taken dance from downtown to uptown, being the first song to be played on an iPod, it set the standard from alcopop to cocktails with still a hint of indie with Bextorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pure unique retro British tone. Y2K brought the popularity of posh kids who went off the rails, earning street credibility. Now we looked to being better than grunge and the environment we lived in, we became inspirational.

The M6 goes between the two cities I spend most of my time in and is layered with digital lights. The red digital figures turn off and on representing when time went from analogue to digital, something I felt accustom to. The unconventional became conventional, time slipping away quicker and places became closer. Life was LED and changed to another pace, travel was no longer for pleasure but essential. The red digital figures remind me of the 1990â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Honda S2000, one of the first cars to take on technology, showing the speed gauge digitally. It also reminds me of Knight Riderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s car K.I.T.T.

The M6 was an expressway to the second biggest city in the UK and beyond, more possibilities that my city could no longer provide. Speed is what we need to pay attention to, life gets shorter the more we have lived and efficiency is top of the list. There are also images in my visuals that come from game machines, remembering that sometimes life is a game to be played. The visuals I edited together with Sneaker Pimps 6, Underground, which features samples at the beginning of James Bond Goldfinger soundtrack, ‘Golden Girl’, my father is a huge fan of James Bond films, remembering them on the old TV set when I was little. The lyrics are sang by Kelli Dayton, also known as Kelli Ali. Talk me down. Safe and sound, Too strung up to sleep. Wear me out. Scream and shout. Swear my time's never cheap. I fake my life like I've lived. I always drive, everywhere and I’m not unfamiliar to driving at night. Time is not cheap and, as I get older, I realise skills are worth something to someone and can make a lot of money. If not directed or noticed, talent can disappear off the radar and never be recognised. How much do we value our self and how much are you worth? Is your time 24 hours, are you so highly creative that you’re too strung up to sleep? The motorway at night is hypnotic, seeing that nothing stands still or sleeps. The visuals also present how the car radio wavelengths play a huge part when driving. What visions constructs in your mind when you’re listening to a song and moving in a vehicle? Sneaker Pimps' promotional video shows windows into small town life, where everyone appears normal to each other but have their own secrets, showing little windows into people’s private perversions. This can be true in life, private thoughts or aspirations, Kelli associates this with an emotional distinctive and gritty voice that proves that creativity can come from darkness.

Towards the end of the film I conclude my images with layers of Birmingham’s iconic buildings. Birmingham is a centre of creativity, from fashion, to visual arts and music. Independence is still alive, whether it be a pop-up art exhibition in the Bull Ring to live radio broadcasts and cultural events in The Rotunda. I have embodied the images with shiny aluminium discs representing the famous sequin dress by Paco Rabanne. There are also images of New Streets lights and purple lit trees that present further depths into what Birmingham city centre has to offer. My purpose was to create emphasis on how a city can evolve, showing not just important places, but the sounds that are a part of our lives. The song that combines these particular layers on my film is Robert Miles, ‘Children’. This song is also aniconic sound from an era when brutalistic concrete constructions were planned to change from a summer smock into a new cocktail dress. Pop dance embraced instrumental compositions, dream house piano melodies, calmer feel to lives on the roads from clubbers returning home from raving. The soundscapes of social pressure with melodic nature compliments other hypnotic visuals I have applied in the film and the final track, ‘Road Rage’ by Catatonia.

Sherrie Edgar is a contemporary visual artist, specialising in film and photography based on themes of loneliness, socialpolitics and capitalism. Edgar is currently studying MA contemporary art practice, led by Darryl Georgiou. With a keen eye for capturing the intangible, such as frequencies of sound, Edgar applies experimental methods to create interactive, innovative and unique art. By provoking emotions, resurgence the viewer is presented with an opportunity to consider the human state through our immediate environment. Edgar is keen to collaborate, capture and share relatable life experiences. Recent work has included regionally exhibited installation work, research undertaken at the Birmingham University Bio Laboratory and community engaged projects.

Edgar's website links: http://vimeo.com/sherrieo http://www.instagram.com/sherriegram/ http://twitter.com/tweetmoncher https://www.facebook.com/SEVisualArt https://www.axisweb.org/p/sherrieedgar/

: P f C d n a , s w e N , s e For Future Issu / g r o l. a n r u jo s f if r / :/ http @popmusicjournal

Experimental writing on popular music Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music is an emerging and exciting journal based at and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University. Riffs provides a platform for the publication of experimental pieces on popular music and was launched in February 2017. The contributions are made available Open Access through the journal website (www.riffsjournal.org) and a limited edition print run. Riffs has a strong DIY and experimental ethos. We aim to push the boundaries of popular music research, communication, and publishing. The next step for the editorial board at Riffs is to develop a creative and experimental space for not only publishing finished pieces, but also offering an online forum for thinking through the ways in which we analyse, understand, and communicate. As one of the largest centres for popular music research, the BCMCR at Birmingham City University offers a wealth of global networks and potential readership. Our editorial team and wider researcher community expand our reach further, with active participation in a range of international research networks to include IASPM, MeCCSA, the Punk Scholars Network, Subcultures Network and the Jazz Research Network. Beyond academia, Riffs is keen to develop relationships with industry, particularly in Birmingham, through events and collaborations. Through these connections, we aim to develop an international and active readership.

Contributor Guidelines Riffs: Experimental research on popular music welcomes pieces from all disciplines and from contributors from academic, industry, or creative backgrounds. Each issue will be based on a prompt, but responses can vary dependent upon the contributor’s interest and experience. As the journal title suggests, we are most interested in pieces that take an experimental approach to the consideration of popular music. For examples of previous interpretations, please visit our journal website. All contributions published by Riffs will be considered by the whole editorial panel, and edited by three specialist editors before publication. Word Limit: 2,000-4,000 (excluding references) Please do not submit full dissertations or theses. All contributions should respond to the prompt and take an experimental approach to undertaking and/or communicating research on popular music. We also welcome shorter written pieces, audio, and visual pieces to include photo essays. Abstract: Please provide an informal, blog-style abstract (under 300 words) and a profile picture. This abstract will be hosted on our journal website and social media platforms. As ever, links to external websites and the use of images, audio and video clips are also welcome. Format: Please email submissions as attachments to the editorial contact given below. All articles should be provided as a .doc or .docx file. All images and webready audio or video clips should also be emailed as separate files, or through a filesharing platform such as WeTransfer or Dropbox. Bio: Please include a short (up to 300 words) bio with your name, institutional affiliation (if appropriate), email address, current research stage within your article, and other useful/interesting information, positioned at the end of your piece. References: If you refer to other publications within your piece, please list these in a ‘Bibliography’ section at the end. All clear formats of referencing are acceptable. Discographies and weblinks can also be detailed at the end of your contribution. Submission: Abstracts for our bi-annual prompts should be emailed to info@riffsjournal.org Please note: Riffs shall be entitled to first use of the contribution in all the journal’s different forms, but the author remains the copyright owner and can re-publish their contribution without seeking the journal’s permission. Riffs reserve the right to decline to publish contributions, if they are submitted after the agreed deadline and without the assigned editor being informed (and agreeing to) a new submission date.